One Man's Notes on Movies and Other Life Obsessions by Chuck Wilson

July 27, 2010

"No
Damn Trespassing, Beware of Mule!" warns the hand-carved sign posted near
the high country cabin of Tennessee recluse Felix Bush (Robert Duvall), whose
abrupt decision to re-engage with the larger world propels Get Low, an
imperfect but rewarding new film. It is 1938, and Felix, who's been in a
self-imposed exile for 40 years—"the first 38 are the
hardest"—decides to throw himself a "living funeral" so he can
hear what people have to say about him. Ads will be posted, a big prize
raffled, and people from four counties invited to attend. To organize
everything, Felix hires Frank Quinn (Bill Murray), the nearby town's fiscally
stressed funeral director ("What do you do when people won't die?"),
and his idealistic young assistant, Buddy (Lucas Black).

If
the idea of a hermit throwing himself a funeral sounds vaguely familiar, that's
because screenwriters Chris Provenzano and C. Gaby Mitchell are drawing on the
true story of a Tennessee hermit who did indeed throw himself a pre-death wake
in '38, one that reportedly drew at least 8,000 attendees. By all accounts, it
was a rousing, music-filled good time, but for this fictionalized version,
Felix has been given a 40-year-old guilty secret that he's ready to unburden
himself of, at long last.

It
wouldn't be fair to reveal the details of Felix's dark past, except to say that
it involves a beautiful woman who died in a fire he may or may not have had a
hand in setting. Near the end of the film, after almost chickening out, he
stands atop a wooden stage and makes his confession into a microphone before
hundreds of strangers. Duvall delivers this speech with a virtuoso range of
vocal tics, from nervously gulped words to a sudden bark of sound that's
half-laugh, half-scream. It's deeply felt work, but director-editor Aaron
Schneider, making his feature debut after winning a short film Oscar in 2003,
undercuts Duvall by staging the scene in a distractingly awkward way. Felix, it
turns out, isn't really speaking to the crowd; he's speaking to Mattie Darrow
(Sissy Spacek), an old girlfriend, newly widowed and just returned to town, who
never understood why he retreated from her and from the world all those years
ago. From the stage, Felix reveals his sins and pleads for Mattie's
forgiveness, but Schneider has literally placed the two actors hundreds of feet
apart, making an emotional connection between them next to impossible.

And
yet, despite that maddening third-act stumble, Get Low is a pleasure to
watch. Provenzano and Mitchell's screenplay has a streak of melancholy running
through it that's right for the film's Depression-era setting and for Felix's
heavy-heart dilemma, yet the script is also dotted with little drops of sly
humor. When Buddy, the funeral home assistant, describes to his boss the
"wad" of money he saw in Felix's hand, Frank says, "Oooh, hermit
money. That's good." The gleeful delivery of that "Oooh" is
vintage Bill Murray, but the lovely thing is that Murray is not trying to sell
a joke; he's simply being Frank Quinn. It's a classic performance.

Surely
it was the company he was keeping that inspired Murray. Duvall and Spacek have
never been in a movie together, yet their acting styles are so similar that it
feels as if they have a long onscreen history. They have three key scenes
together in Get Low, including one that finds Felix and Mattie walking
down a wooded road. Nothing much happens; they talk and laugh, and their bodies
sway back and forth toward one another, like young lovers courting. After a
time, he offers her his arm and she takes it, with a firm, happy clutch—two
characters, two actors, at ease and in joy, delighting in one another's magic.
(Chuck Wilson)